A colleague said to me, that we can create a live dashboard in Power BI which displays actual data from database. I said NO! This post will show you, what you can do to achieve this goal.
I’ve created a Power BI report which consumes data via DirectQuery from a SQL Database and a Measure for a change detection which make a refresh every five seconds. So, if I add a row to the table, I see the actual number of them very quickly.
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image.png)
I’ve inserted a new row and aftern5 seconds you see the result inside the report. You need for this scenario a Premium capacity or PPU. Next, I’ve created a Dashboard and pinned the card and the whole report page to it. To compare this two possibilities, by pinning a card to the dashboard, you lose the background color. But both visualisations will not refresh when you add new rows. To see them, you must refreesh the dashboard.
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-1.png)
Interesting is, the card refreshes the data, the embedded report not.
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-2.png)
By pressing F5 or waiting several minutes, you get the visuals synchronized.
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-3.png)
By adding the dashboard or the report to an APP, you have the same behavior.
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-4.png)
One option could be, you built a Power BI Embedded application, another could be, you wait for the possibility from Power BI to do the refresh of a dashboard automatically. But, in my point of view, the users should be using the report…
![](https://www.flip-design.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-5.png)